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When I launched the Perfume Maker's Club in the fall of 2004, my interest was in sharing knowledge of a "discovery" I had made which boiled down to this — You don't have to be Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren or Justin Bieber to launch your own perfume. Philip Goutell can launch a perfume and you can too.
Launching a perfume (or a men's cologne, which is nothing more than a perfume by another name, requires two things — you must have buyers and you must have your product — your perfume. It's as simple as that.
My involvement with perfume (a men's cologne was my starting point) began because I had buyers. I had launched a very small but quite successful marketing program that was bringing in orders even before my first fragrance was ready to ship.
So the Perfume Maker's Club, in a sense, was originally developed not for amateur or independent perfumers but rather for marketers and entrepreneurs wishing to build a business selling their own fragrances.
In my own beginning with perfume I ran into obstacles which, one by one, were overcome. And I learned that by becoming my own manufacturer, getting my new fragrances into bottles, ready to sell, myself, I could achieve a really low cost per bottle and that allowed me a really good markup.
So my original contributions to the Perfume Maker's Club were technical in nature ... how to do it if you are an individual or small company. And my original advice to others was, you can do everything yourself EXCEPT creating the scent.
As I have advised others, for my first fragrances I used existing fragrance compounds, available to anyone, purchased from vendors few people knew about. And although these were not "custom" fragrances made exclusivity for me, nobody — not one customer — ever came to me and said, "Your XYZ is exactly like So-and-So's ABC." It never happened. Customers accepted my fragrances as original and indeed, they WERE completely new to my customers.
When you have a good thing going, why change? Why fiddle with success? I had buyers. I had fragrance. Why ask for more? But I did. And that was the turning point for my business and for this newsletter.
Business was going nicely when I approached one of our fragrance suppliers (Robertet) and asked if they could create for us a new, original perfume. At this point that I was confronted with the difference between the way I was "creating" my fragrances and fragrances that were truly original scents. Yes, they could develop an exclusive, original fragrance for me — but it would cost a lot more that I was prepared to spend.
Up to this point I had done almost everything myself. 1,000 bottles of a men's cologne? No problem. I order bottles, closures, fragrance, and labels and bottle it on a kitchen table. But the fragrance itself was always being made for me by others and I had not a clue as to how it was done. I knew nothing. I understood all the rest — the bottles, the caps, or sprays, the labels, the filling — but creating the fragrance — the smell itself — was still a mystery to me. But how hard could it be? I was about to find out.
I like to get to the bottom of things. I now wanted to understand how the fragrance compound — the scent itself — is created and I wanted to see if I could make it myself.
In time, like others, I stumbled across PerfumersWorld and Stephen V. Dowthwaite's home study course in perfumery. Within two years I had dropped all my former fragrances — the ones I had made with non-exclusive fragrance compounds purchased from others — and was marketing only fragrances created from scents I had made myself.
As I spread my wings in perfumery, so too did the orientation of the Perfume Maker's Club. While the emphasis continues to be on the commercial exploitation of perfume as a high markup product, my attitude toward perfumery has become wildly respectful and I now look on it as an art, and perfumers — both mass market professionals and home brew creators — as artists. This change in attitude is reflected in both the Club's resources and in our monthly newsletter.
Today while I continue to develop new fragrances for my own niche business, I am more involved in helping others realize their goals with perfume. I am doing this through consulting, through instruction manuals, and through the Perfume Maker's Club.
Philip Goutell
11/15/2011
